1. Technology Field
The present invention generally relates to a storage system, in particular, to a non-volatile memory storage system and a method for reading an expansion read only memory (ROM) image thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Along with the widespread of digital cameras, camera phones, and MP3 in recently years, the consumers' demand to storage media has increased drastically too. Flash memory is one of the most adaptable memories for such battery-powered portable products due to its characteristics such as data non-volatility, low power consumption, small volume, and non-mechanical structure. Thereby, flash memory storage device has become one of the most focused electronic products in recent years. How to produce smaller and lighter flash memory storage devices has become one of the major subjects in the industry along with the trend of minimizing digital products.
A flash memory storage device is usually connected to a host through a connecting interface, such as a universal serial bus (USB) or a PCI bus. It should be mentioned here that the basic input/output system (BIOS) in the host cannot turn on a device which does not support any plug and play bus (for example, a PCI bus) when the host is booted up. Thus, if the bus in the flash memory storage device does not support the plug and play function, the flash memory storage device has to be additionally disposed with an expansion read only memory (ROM) which stores an activation code for turning on the flash memory storage device. The BIOS of the host detects the expansion ROM during the execution thereof and copies the activation code in the expansion ROM to a random access memory (RAM) of the host to be executed and to turn on the flash memory storage device. After that, the operating system executes the corresponding driving program to drive the flash memory storage device. However, the ROM takes up space in the flash memory storage device and accordingly the flash memory storage device cannot be effectively reduced.